~ pagan songs & tales

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Amphitrite, The Third One Who Encircles

I watched the copper moon
heavy and saturated sag in
the night of its weighted
descent beneath umbels of constellations
I listened to the infinite heave-ho symphony of
the tides (really just a cacophony of things I can’t hear)
incessantly crashing from the eternal night
to the edge of my feet
I walked in — wimples discarded to the shores —
uninhibited as Ishtar (1)
but I am Amphitrite (2) as I glide into the folds
of the Mediterranean with my hands free~I am the tide-breaker~
I challenged the universe in the time
of Aquarius on the waves
I saw myself walk on the water
deeper and further into deafening darkness
to find him and save her

We were three actually~I am the third one who encircles~
three souls sui generis
we share a telepathy
beyond all physical intimacies
Three oracles
Three sirens
Three mythological siblings
Three threads spun in the tapestry of
consciousness from the same flax
Three points of light which met at the
center of the world (in seriatim)
and formed a beacon in the eye of
the maelstrom
An ecumenical holy trinity:
the Mason
the Healer
and the Jewess
He and I tell her:tu fui ego eris
I was what you are; what I am, you will be

1) Ishtar was the ancient Sumero-Babylonian goddess of love, fertility, sexuality, healing and war. She is cognate with the Greek Goddess Aphrodite, the Assyrian Goddess Astarte and the Sumerian goddess Inanna. In the Babylonian pantheon she “was the divine personification of the planet Venus”. Her cult involved sacred prostitution as the goddess of courtesans.

2) In Greek mythology, Amphitrite was a sea-goddess (of the Mediterranean) and wife of Poseidon. Her Roman counterpart is Salacia. Her name is interpreted as “the third one who encircles [the sea]”, “the surrounding third,” or “the third one who encircles (everything)” (because the ancient Greeks thought the whole world was encircled by a river-god, Oceanus). Her name is also said to mean the “third element,” which is the sea.

[Shoshana Sarah draws upon Greek, Near Eastern and Jewish mythology to craft her own unique poetic-thealogy.]

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